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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/27705971">Booker's Backstory</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gamebird/pseuds/Gamebird'>Gamebird</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>The Old Guard (Movie 2020)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Andromache - Freeform, Booker is back with the group due to events in a fic I haven't published and won't until February, But none of that is relevant to him explaining his background to Nile, Found Family, Gen, Joe - Freeform, Nicky - Freeform, a Maltese safe house set seven months after the movie ends</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-11-25</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-11-25</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-10 14:29:26</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,699</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/27705971</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gamebird/pseuds/Gamebird</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>I needed a backstory for Booker, so I wrote one.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>2</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>34</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Booker's Backstory</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>"Tell me about your family," Nile asked.</p><p>"This one?" Booker waved generally at the group in the Maltese safe house. Andy was working on a piece of wood she was making into a spear. Nicky was chopping vegetables to go with the lamb roast that was slow cooking for dinner. Joe was cleaning up the back porch.</p><p>Booker and Nile had just set aside their work of compiling a list of resources needed for low-fidelity id fakes – cards that would pass visual muster with a bouncer, but probably not a police officer. For the better ones, they'd have to rely on Copley. "No," Nile said. "The ones you had before."</p><p>"Ones, plural?"</p><p>"Andy said you had two." Nile looked over at Andy, who didn't look up.</p><p>"It depends on how you count them," Booker said.</p><p>"Tell me about them."</p><p>He gave a dry chuckle. "You want to know?" She nodded. "You want to know?" he asked again, confused.</p><p>From the couch where she was whittling on the stave, Andy said, "She's the only one who doesn't know it from the start."</p><p>"Ah!" he scoffed. "<em>You</em> don't even know it from the start."</p><p>"I don't? Tell us then."</p><p>"Two-hundred years and now you want to know my life story?" He shook his head in disbelief.</p><p>Nile said, "It's been less than two weeks for me. And I can see why no one knows if we have to ask for it a half dozen times. We had a deal. I held up my end. So spill."</p><p>"So." He leaned back. "My family. My father was a drunkard and my mother was a laundress. He wasn't a very good drunkard, but he drank what he could and was drunk as often as possible. Things never worked out for him. It was something I inherited from him, but I did not know that when I was young.</p><p>"Things looked very good for me at first. The daughter of one of my mother's clients took a fancy to me and me to her. She was beautiful. Her name was Lille and I was <em>infatuated</em>," he said wistfully. "Her father owned a print shop that made documents for the local magistrate. He brought me on for pay. It was an excellent job for a young man such as myself, with no other prospects. I was taught many things. He said I was the fastest learner he'd yet had. I had many dreams of eventually owning that shop … but it was not to be."</p><p>His face turned grim. "Lille took ill shortly after her seventeenth birthday and never recovered. She passed two months later. In that time, I had come to love her. I was heartbroken at losing her, so devastated that I did not return to my employment for I could not stand the reminder. Instead, I followed my father's example and began to drink. When my money ran out, I joined with a group of ne'er-do-wells for whom my literacy and penmanship was useful, as was my ability to duplicate the documents I'd seen in my work.</p><p>"Eventually, I spent time with a woman named Rosette. She and I … we never loved one another, but we were together for many years. We shared accommodations, but there was no loyalty. When I was arrested for forgery, she did not come for me. If she had, if she'd claimed we had a family or were going to, I might have been spared. I at least would have had other options. They sent me on to the military, because I had none.</p><p>"When I returned from the war, Rosette did not want even the arrangement we'd had before. I was a deserter and she knew it. Most did not. I moved to Reims and portrayed myself as a clerk honorably released from military duty. I was able to parley my skills into employment in a law office, where I met Claire. She was much younger than I and of a lower station than I was pretending, but that did not matter. We hit it off well."</p><p>His voice turned fond and his eyes softened. "We spent time together. I knew she was seeing other men, but that didn't matter to me. She came to me finally, saying she had conceived and we would have a child. She proposed marriage. I accepted. The boy, Henri, was born healthy and active. I loved him dearly. I loved her, too, but not as much as him. When he was three or four, she was pregnant again and this time … the child did not favor me."</p><p>Andy snorted. "Would have been closer if it was Joe's kid."</p><p>Booker tipped his head in acknowledgement. "His name was Rene and he was also healthy. I loved him as well, but I did ask her. Andy had mentioned to me several times that she did not believe I could father children. I'd discounted it because she had only a single man to base her account on and no stallion is a stud until he is proven. But I had heard her words.</p><p>"Claire admitted she'd been seeing others. She said she would never do it again if I would stay with her. There was no chance I would leave in any case, so of course I agreed. She had no further children." He sighed. "I wish I had told her to see other men. We both wished for more children. But Henri and Rene grew strong and well. They were much admired and I doted on them in all the ways I'd seen good fathers do and that I had never known myself.</p><p>"When they were of age, I arranged apprenticeships for them and found places for their work. Claire helped them find wives. Now as I said, she was much younger than I was when we married. She was much older than I appeared when she became a grandmother. She had begun to look at me differently. And sometimes there were things she said that were too admiring of how unchanged I was.</p><p>"This, too, Andromache had promised me – a lack of aging, along with the healing. When Henri's wife Anne had her first child, the birth was difficult and Claire moved in with them. She told me she wasn't coming back and that I was not to move in with her." He swallowed and wrung his hands slowly, his shoulders slumping, his eyes downcast. "I waited a few years. She did not change her mind. I sold my things, gave her most of the money, and moved on."</p><p>He gestured at Andy and Nicky, who had both stopped what they were doing to listen. Nicky's towel was forgotten in his hands. Booker said, "I went on some small adventures with them in Crimea. I was hurt several times. I felt unappreciated and clumsy. I had no training worth mentioning. I had not died once yet suddenly I was shot in the leg with a musket ball and then later stabbed in the back." He shook his head.</p><p>Andy snorted again. "You-"</p><p>"No," Nicky interrupted her. "Let him tell it. Our side is unimportant."</p><p>Booker continued, "I did not find it a good experience. I was more comfortable with a fire poker in my hand than a sword, with a pen than a gun. I left them and wandered. I deserted them, too. It was not pretty. Or honorable. But it was war and I had no stomach for it.</p><p>"After some years of squandering my money and pushing my luck, I fell in love with a woman named Nathalie. It was a doomed affair from the start. She was a kitchen helper at times, a professional at others – a whore, I mean, but I mean that with no disrespect for I was no better. And I <em>did</em> love her.</p><p>"She became pregnant and came to me in search of some elixir to rid herself of it. I was known as a learned man which was solely due to having some ninety years of life, with access to books and papers for most of that time. She told me the child was mine. I did not believe her and I was certain of it when Jean-Pierre was born, but it mattered not. We had married and I had a new family.</p><p>"On their behalf, I stopped drinking. I found respectable employment with the law, this time as a bureaucrat and there's another story there but I'll skip it for now. We did well and bought a small house with a garden. Jean-Pierre never thrived, no matter how healthful we arranged his circumstances to be. There were also many who remembered Nathalie's station and the chicanery that marred the attainment of my position. This limited the boy's options.</p><p>"He was also bitter and rather mean, even as a toddler. He reminded me greatly of my father in his temperament. I worried that was something I had transmitted to him like a disease, despite my efforts to improve myself. I managed to keep him out of prison, out of the military, out of back alleys, and out of the gutter, but it was a harder task than sabotaging cannons." He gestured at Andy and Nicky.</p><p>"At one point, I thought him old enough to know the truth. He was a man in his late thirties and his life was a shambles. I thought I could tell him my story and show him my abilities, and he would see that there was proof of miracles in the world, proof of good. He …" Words failed him for a while. No one spoke.</p><p>Booker continued. "He discovered he had a cancer only months after I showed him. It had been a difficult period because he was constantly coming up with schemes by which we could profit from it. I did not want profit. I wanted a happy wife, which I rarely did as she was always upset over his misadventures. He went to her and told her what I'd told him. I'd been with her nearly forty years at that point."</p><p>Booker spread his hands helplessly. "Nathalie knew I had not aged. But she still told Jean-Pierre he was wrong. That he was a fool. Jean-Pierre conspired to stab me straight through the hand, in front of her. It healed, of course. She left me and moved back in with her parents. I did not see her again. I was told she died the next year of a kidney ailment.</p><p>"Jean-Pierre became increasingly demanding as his condition worsened." He swallowed. "I studied medicine. Too little, too late, perhaps, but I could find no way to help him and no understanding of my ability. I have told you the rest, before, when we were in Andy's cave in France."</p><p>He was silent a moment, before raising wet eyes to Andy and Nicky. Joe was in the doorway to the porch, listening as well. "After that, I came to you. I came to this family. Whom I have spent the last seventy or eighty years with. And I have treated them poorly for it." He swallowed slowly and wrung his hands again. "Which I both regret and do not. This is my family either way."</p><p>"That is incredible," Nile said. "You guys have so much life and so many experiences." She looked over at Andy and Nicky. "You didn't know this?"</p><p>Andy shrugged. "I didn't know it the way he's told it. There was no reason why he'd need to tell it - I <em>met</em> most of those people. I saw his homes, where he worked. Drank with him in seedy bars." She ended that with a crooked grin and a short laugh. Booker laughed with her and wiped his eyes.</p><p>Andy added, "I checked in with him every few years. I made sure he always knew how to get in touch with us. I didn't realize it was going to take him <em>more than a hundred years to do it</em>." She sounded half put-out and half amused by that.</p><p>"See," Nile said to Booker, "I thought you were saying they didn't care!"</p><p>Booker gestured between Nicky and Joe. "I didn't see these two as much. Only a few times. I don't know if <em>they</em> care." He looked between them with eyes twinkling a little. Joe rolled his eyes. Nicky made one laugh.</p><p>Booker went on, "But I saw Andy often. Eventually," he swallowed and tipped his head back a little, "I realized I had seen her more than I had seen anyone I was not bound to by law or employment. And for much longer. And with fewer secrets. Although she always had something to tell me I was doing wrong."</p><p>"That's because you were always doing something wrong," Andy said.</p><p>He chuckled. "She told me I wasn't the father, I shouldn't marry, I shouldn't work for a place that kept records, I wasn't the father this time either, I should keep myself further away from the enforcers of the law, I shouldn't marry <em>again</em>, I still wasn't the father, I needed to move to another country, I shouldn't drink so much – and she told me <em>that one</em> while she was so drunk she could not rise from her chair." He laughed again.</p><p>"You got me, there," Andy conceded.</p><p>Nile said, "I saw you guzzle half a fifth of vodka and you were barely tipsy. How much did you drink to get that messed up?"</p><p>Booker chuckled. "It was a good night. She won all my money at poker and then spent it on liquor for both of us. That was very kind of you," he said turning to Andy, "since I was going to spend it that way anyway."</p><p>"You had a lot to say about that kid," Andy responded. "I'm sorry it didn't work out." Her tone became more earnest. "I really am."</p><p>Booker shrugged. "Such is life."</p><p>"So when did you die?" Nile asked.</p><p>"Nineteen forty-two," Booker said. "I fell off a boat near Guam and, ironically given the situation with Quynh, I drowned. I did not know how to swim. The only dangers I have faced have been with them."</p><p>Andy screened her eyes and tried to stifle laughter. Very tightly, she said, "Nile, we have since adopted a policy of extensive training for new people."</p><p>Nicky said, "We did not do right by Booker."</p><p>Joe said, "It's amazing he didn't ditch us more often."</p><p>Booker said, "Your company was rather … unrewarding. Especially at first." He looked to Nile. "There was a great deal of learning by doing, or having done to me."</p><p>"Yeah," she said slowly. "Well. They've improved a lot. They've been trying to train me."</p><p>Booker nodded. "Listen to them. I did not."</p><p>Nile nodded. "But I thought you said you … what happened in 1812?"</p><p>Booker shook his head. "That is a whole second story, most of which is unpleasant. I became immortal then."</p><p>"He died," Andy said.</p><p>"I became immortal then," Booker repeated. "I was hung. I was reported dead. I escaped later."</p><p>"He died," Andy repeated. Booker made a disgusted noise and a dismissive wave of his hand.</p><p>Andy sniffed the air twice. Nicky moved into the kitchen. "Yes, you are right," he said, although Andy hadn't said anything. "The food will be ready soon."</p><p>"And when it is," Joe said, "we can eat outside. I'll get the table set up." Andy moved to help him.</p><p>Booker turned to Nile. He ticked off his fingers as he spoke. "There was the family I was born in, the family I was betrothed to, the one on the streets, the mother of Henri and Rene, the mother of Jean-Pierre, and this one."</p><p>"You were betrothed to … what was her name? Lilly?"</p><p>"Lille, yes. Only for a few weeks before her illness, but still, they welcomed me as one of them." He regarded his fingers – all curled in but only his pinkie finger touching his palm. "Six."</p><p>Nile looked at Andy, who shrugged one shoulder as she carried plates outside and said, "Depending on how you count it."</p><p>Nile said, "We get to define who's family. And if he says six, then it's six."</p>
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